If you’re a web designer, you have the skills necessary to create great-looking sites. However, you might now realize that you can also create sites that accomplish goals and help business owners achieve their objectives.

When designing a site, it’s essential to keep the business owner’s goals in mind at all times. You might want to include specific features or functions on your site that align with these objectives. By doing so, you can create a site that is visually appealing and helps the business owner accomplish their goals and succeed in their industry.

Let’s look at how you can incorporate the business owner’s goals into your design process and how this can ultimately help you create truly successful sites.

1- Research your client’s business.

The first step when designing a site is to research your client’s industry and business. This will give you a better understanding of their goals and objectives and any challenges they might currently be facing.

When researching your client’s business, note any pain points you can address on their site. For example, if you’re working with an e-commerce site, you might note that they are struggling with low conversion rates or high shopping cart abandonment. Or if you’re working with a small business, you might note that they are having trouble gaining visibility in search engines or generating leads.

Once you have a better idea of your client’s goals and challenges, think about how you can help them in their efforts. This will give you a starting point for the design process, and it can help you create a site that is focused on achieving specific goals.

2 – Incorporate goal-based design elements into your design.

Once you know your site’s goals, you can start incorporating these elements into the design itself. For example, if your client’s main goal is to boost their visibility in search engines, you might focus on including SEO-friendly content and optimizing your site for specific keywords. Or if you’re working with a small business, you might focus on promoting your client’s products or services via social media to drive more traffic and engagement.

Consider the goals your client is trying to achieve, and then design a site to help them accomplish these goals. Not only will this help you create a more focused site, but it will also help the business owner achieve their goals and better succeed in their industry.

Something else you’ll want to keep in mind is the overall user experience on your site. Your goal as a web designer should be to create an excellent user experience that allows users to interact easily with your client’s site and find the information they need quickly and efficiently.

3 – Test your site to make sure it’s optimized for goals.

Once you’ve completed the design process and launched your client’s new site, it’s crucial to test it and ensure that it is optimized for the goals you identified at the beginning of the process. This means conducting A/B split tests to compare different versions of your site or using heat maps and other tools to analyze user behavior on the site.

With this data, you can identify any issues impacting your site’s success and make changes as needed to optimize it for specific goals. For example, if you notice that users frequently abandon their shopping carts, you might want to add a coupon code pop-up or adjust the checkout process to encourage more sales.

4 – Continue tracking progress and tweaking your site to improve results.

Once you’ve launched your client’s new site and begun tracking the performance, don’t just stop there. Continue to track your metrics over time, adjusting and tweaking your site as needed to improve the results. This can involve running additional A/B split tests, making changes to your site’s design and layout, or even adding new content as needed.

As long as you’re working with a client who is focused on achieving specific goals for their business, you can continue to track the success of your site over time and make changes as needed to help them reach these goals.

Here are some of the most common mistakes designers make when designing sites for their clients:

No one is perfect, and even the best web designers can make mistakes from time to time. Here are some of the most common problems you may encounter when designing sites for your clients:

1 – Not fully understanding your client’s budget

The sky isn’t always the limit regarding web design projects. You must understand your client’s budget to create a site that works within this constraint.

You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you’ve spent hours designing a site completely out of your client’s price range. If they don’t have enough money to hire a developer for coding, for example, it’s your responsibility to recommend a more affordable solution.

Transparency is key when it comes to working with clients, and you must be completely upfront about the costs of a potential project. You might even use this as an opportunity to help your client better understand their budget and how to spend it more wisely going forward.

2 – Not conducting user research

One major mistake many web designers make is not conducting user research before designing a new site. You might assume that you know exactly what your client’s customers need and want, but this isn’t always the case.

You need to conduct user research before starting a new design project so that you can learn more about your client’s target audience, their goals and challenges, and what they need from a site. User research will also help you better understand the site’s target audience and how they will interact with it.

3 – Not collecting enough data from the client

Many web designers fall short when it comes to collecting all the necessary data from their clients, which can create numerous problems down the road.

The more data you collect from your clients, the easier it will be to design a site that meets their needs and gets them closer to their goals.

Before you begin any design process, ask your client for examples of other sites that they like and dislike, as well as examples of sites that are similar to theirs. You’ll also want to ask their thoughts on what features they want to see or what elements they want to avoid.

4 – Not communicating with the client during every step of the design process

If you want to create a successful site for your client, you need to keep them in the loop at every step of the process. This shows them that they are your top priority, and it will help to build their trust in you.

Web designers make the mistake of communicating with clients at random times throughout the design process instead of setting up regular check-in meetings to keep them in the loop.

Try to set up a weekly meeting with your client to discuss the project’s progress, and be sure to ask them for feedback as often as possible.

5 – Not testing the site thoroughly before launch

Not testing a site before launching it is always a big mistake, as you’ll want to fix any issues that pop up as quickly as possible.

The site’s functionality, load speed, and accessibility are the most important things to test. The last thing you want is for a potential client to visit your client’s site and have it crash on them or have any problems using it.

Test, test, and test again. You never know what little glitch you might stumble upon that could seriously harm your client’s reputation.

Conclusion

It’s your job as a web designer to create a site that meets your client’s needs, and you want to be sure that it provides them with the results they are looking for. Delivering what they need isn’t rocket science, but it can be difficult if you don’t know how to avoid your own mistakes.

You must never make the same mistakes twice; if you do, make sure to learn from them so that they don’t happen again. Most importantly, always be open to feedback, and don’t get defensive when receiving criticism.

Your success as a web designer depends on your willingness to learn and grow. Anyone who wants to be successful on the web must be open to new ideas, techniques, and strategies.

There’s always something new to learn when you’re in the web design field, and the internet is constantly changing.

Always try to stay ahead of the curve, and do what it takes to stay on top of your game. It’s a competitive world out there, and you need to be able to keep up.